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Tim Ferriss has done so well promoting his philosophy and after reading his book The Four Hour Work Week, belief that you could actually have a 4 hour work week had more definition. Read my initial thoughts here.

Tim has extended his book or revised it with new information, however today’s comments only address the four hours discussed in the book. Four hours to make a living seem somewhat improbable. Really, can you support yourself, let alone a family by putting in four hours, mostly spent outsourcing to others?

Certainly the feasibility is a rare opportunity, however there is an unstated principle that Tim talks about and it glaring to the reader who is paying attention. The four hours of work, is the time you must spend working, doing thing that you must do and probably don’t want to. It is the paper pushing, the phone calls, the organization, the number crunching,

Four Hour Work Week Expanded and Updated

whatever it is that you don’t really like to do. This is the work that you must put in, even if you aren’t enjoying it.

The remainder of the time you spend creating the necessary income is not really work. Most professional athletes will comment on how lucky they really are to “play” for money. They are grateful for their opportunities and recognize that they are the uncommon. This does not mean that they don’t spend time and significant effort doing what makes them money. They may spend four hours a week working at the parts of their job they prefer not to do, but he remainder of the time that makes money is doing what they love and thoroughly enjoy.

That is the answers – the four hour work week is not a week where you spend four hours working and could sit on the couch the rest of the time doing nothing! No. The four hours are the hours you must spend doing and outsourcing the stuff you don’t like. The rest of your time is spent doing the stuff your really do like!

Find what you love to spend your time doing, making money in the process of doing that or those things, and the effort become enjoyable. You no longer work 40 or 50 hours a week doing stuff you could really care less doing. You spend 4 hours of that stuff and the other time is spend enjoying your time doing what you like.

I recall seeing this book on the bookshelf at a Borders and thought, “yeah right, who is gonna fall for that?” I, of course, didn’t buy the book and didn’t even consider it, the title was way to unrealistic and far beyond achieving, except for some heir to a fortune, which I am not. I don’t know what book I bought that day, but I am sure it was some educational, “how-to”, mechanical book on climbing the ranks or mustering the courage to be just different enough to leave the dungeon of corporate expectation and take a chance in order to climb the ranks.

Holy cow, was I wrong. A close friend MONTHS later said he picked up this book and read it and found Tim Ferriss to be a fascinating personality, presenting a concept that is not far fetched and in fact is rather logical in so many ways. The premise being that we all think that there is a magic number out there that we need to get to in order to say, “Yes, I have made it, I can now do nothing for the rest of my days.” Mr. Ferriss says that this very common approach is a gross indication of a strong desire to be lazy, not to live the life you wish to live.

Living the life you dream about and say “wouldn’t it be nice” or try to image what that thing/place/freedom/etc would feel like is what Mr. Ferriss calls Lifestyle Design or basically, creating the circumstances that all you to be, do and go where whatever you want. It isn’t the million bucks that you want, it is what the million bucks will do for you that you want; and in most cases, you don’t really need a million bucks to achieve what you really want.

Don’t be the “fat man in the red BMW”. The concept of the corporate employee who is climbing the ranks, who buys the fancy BMW because it is the cool new car (not necessarily the car he wants) and ends up fat because he spends his 80 hours a week at work and only drives the fancy car to and from work. This indicator has been adopted by my friend and I in order to remind each other where we want to go (in life) and how we want to live it.

That is truely the basis of Mr. Ferriss’s work – Living the life that you would like to live. What kind of time freedom are you looking for and what lifestyle do you want to maintain in order to achieve that freedom (essentially, how much money, if you break it down to the penny, do you need to earn in order to get there). Consider how little you would have to do; the least amount of time and effort to establish that lifestyle. This isn’t a substitute for being lazy, in fact this is just the opposite. The Lifestyle Design of the New Rich (NR) is to free up your time from doing the things you don’t want to do, so you can spend the maximum amount of your time doing what you want to do.

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I have personally adopting a new approach to my current “job” and how I spend my time there in order to get to where I want to go with my time and money. I see things changing and hope to publish a case study for Mr. Ferriss when the day arrives.